Chapter 35. A Dragon, The Sun
Minnelil huffed, arms folded across her chest. “The time to hit on someone is not after they’ve just gone through something traumatic.”
“In his defense, he didn’t know,” Fek said.
“He called me a girl,” Grit said, at least as offended as Minnelil.
“He calls everyone a girl,” Fek said. “It’s just a boy thing.”
“He’s a grown-ass adult man!” Grit shouted.
Fek was starting to look more doubtful about how the discussion was going. “Still sprightly for his age?”
I snorted. We were on our way back to the dorm. Minnelil had promised to continue with the channelling lessons still tonight. I was stuffed and warm. Frederik had been a welcome distraction, and maybe he actually knew what he was doing with the council. Back in Tenorsbridge, Hormens had been a bit similar. Very easy to get along with, applying only the right amount of pressure to make things line up his way. Occasionally, the pressure had been applied with a dagger through the windpipe.
I wrinkled my nose and pressed my eyes shut, driving away the comparison. So far Frederik had given me no reason to suspect he was anything but a harmless dolt, but now that I had the thought, it didn’t leave me alone. I clenched my teeth, making my face hard. I would need to be more careful around him.
“Many people would be gratified if he paid any attention to them,” Minnelil said after a moment, almost to herself. “He is very rich. Handsome, even.”
“Is he actually dumb or is it a show?” I asked.
“Bit of both, I think,” Fek said.
“Hmm,” I said. Going to lunch was a weird idea in general. Less than a month ago, I had been going through piles of waste to try to find something edible. Lunch invitations weren’t a thing I had needed to consider. Once, in a previous life, I had hoped Taum would ask me out, but he only had eyes for Lann. Then they died hand in hand, burned by the Kertharians.
Dodged an arrow there, eh?
“Think you can do it again?” Minnelil asked.
“Maybe. But I want to be able to do it by myself.”
“Good, that makes sense,” she said. She smiled, but lowered her hands back to the table.
I frowned, looking at them. Her hands looked like she had never touched anything. No faint scars, nails round and filed smooth.
“Relax your face,” she said.
“I wasn’t…” I said, and frowned again.
“No, relax. The opposite of that,” she said.
“Hah hah,” I said, closing my eyes to keep from being distracted.
I was worried I wouldn’t feel anything, would be as lost as when trying channeling the first time. Instead, I reached the power almost immediately. I remembered the way it had felt last time and followed the memory.
“Don’t force it,” Minnelil said. “You’re still frowning.”
I relaxed my face again. It was hard. I felt the ache in my temples, the tension in my jaw. Focusing while relaxing, intending something so hard while not pressing, making it slip away from under my attention.
“Breathe in through your nose. Don’t worry if you lose it, just be grateful you noticed and return your mind to the task.”
I was thinking about why she had such a wide mouth. Did all elves have wide mouths or was it just her face? “Goddamn,” I muttered.
I heard Minnelil chuckle. “You noticed. It’s good. And no, Fek, you can’t! Shoo.”
“What was he about to do?”
“Focus, Lina. I feel you’re getting nearer.”
I breathed in and held the breath gently. I felt the sparkling energy inside me. I moved my fingers in time with its ripples, following its undulation. I didn’t see it, not really, but I felt the tangles of power inside myself and in the room surrounding me. My eyes were closed, but Minnelil’s shape burned bright before me. The mana moved slowly, bubbling from some spring inside her chest. Something monstrous blazed behind me. A dragon. The sun.
“Hey, look,” Fek said. “She’s doing it.”
My eyes flew open, and I glanced over my shoulder.
Fek took a step back. “Um, hey.” He rubbed at the back of his neck and glanced away as I kept staring at him.
“You couldn’t have disturbed her just a moment later?” Minnelil asked. “Don’t mind him, Lina. Look!”
Tangles of glowing lines hung in the air before me. They resembled a bowl of glowing and floating spaghetti, bright blue. “I drew that?” I asked as the lines started to fade.
“Sure did!” Fek shouted. He slapped me on the back. “Whoo!”
Minnelil smiled at me. “You must have really felt it. Drawing multiple lines at a time takes a lot of control.”
“I don’t know what I was doing,” I said quietly. “I felt it. I could see you.”
“Even more impressive. Most people can get a vague sense of their surroundings when channeling, but not much more.”
“I can’t feel anything when I do it,” Fek said.
Hearing his voice snapped my mind back to the earlier feeling. My breath caught.
“You’re just too pleased with yourself to notice anything else!” Grit shouted from her bed.
Fek answered something to her. I didn’t really hear it, as I was still thinking about the amount of power that had hovered behind my shoulder.
“What are you thinking about?” Minnelil asked. “How was it?”
“Uhm,” I said. “How much do you sense when you do it?”
“Quite a lot, I’m told. Elves are generally more sensitive.”
“How about…” I trailed off, glancing toward Fek. He was swinging his hands at Grit, who wagged a finger at him.
“I see, yes,” Minnelil said. “That’s the reason why he’s here. Quite a lot of power for a young man to contain.”
Quite a lot didn’t cover half of it, but if she wasn’t worried, then maybe I didn’t need to be either. I had too many other questions left to spend time sticking my nose in other people’s business. “Why does it feel different than spells and other magic stuff? You said channeling could help control the tingling?”
“Is that what you call it? Hmm, I guess I can see that. It’s a good question,” she said, resting an elbow on the table and her chin on her palm. The tips of her fingers reached higher than her eyes. She brushed an eyebrow, before starting to speak again. “The mana flowing through living things and the world is one thing. Alive, you could say. Shaping it by using runes calcifies it, forces it run in particular shapes.”
“Is that… a good thing?”
“That’s another good question. You’re asking if it can be a bad thing, and it can. The deserts of…” she stopped, biting her lip. “The deserts in the east were created by the ancients in their search for power. They desiccated large swaths of the continent.”
The deserts in Kerthar, she meant. She had caught herself in time, but I understood and tensed up all the same. Even in the orphanage, those parts of history had been avoided and spoken in a roundabout way. There had been others like me there as well. People who had lost their families.
“But you don’t need to worry. Mana is in all living things, created and replenished constantly. It’s actually very difficult to pull on power from outside of yourself, so you don’t need to worry about killing the houseplants when casting spells. The worse that can happen is that you squeeze out yourself and get a headache. Some stubborn people can even cause themselves to faint.”
“I bet Lina is going to do it so much,” Fek said.
“Agreed,” Grit said.
I snorted. “Okay, okay. Fine.”
Minnelil smiled her quiet smile. “Lay off her, you two. We have a lot of practicing to do. Let us focus.”
I spent the next two hours training. Minnelil mostly read a book, something that she refused to show me and that made her blush, loaned from the library. I should go check out that place. It sounded fun.
She said she didn’t need to sleep for a long while still, so she could keep me company as I practiced. Fek ran around the place until he tired himself and suddenly fell asleep with a book resting on his face. Grit pulled the covers on him and then went to sleep herself.
Channeling was becoming easier. Luckily it seemed like it was more a thing that had needed to happen once and then I could keep getting better at it, than something that would be infuriatingly hard and incomprehensible every single time in a new way.
I tried to sense the mana inside myself, but it was harder than seeing it in other people. It was just… me. Maybe that was why Fek seemed so relaxed about himself, and maybe also the reason why he didn’t sense anything. How could he, when his insides burned like Hector’s furnace?
I yawned and the flow of mana stopped. The line I was drawing into the air turned into a squiggle and petered out.
“Maybe it’s time to call it a night?” Minnelil said in a low voice.
“Soon,” I said, looking at the sorry excuse of a glowing line that had failed the moment I wasn’t totally focused on it. “I want to learn it properly before I go to sleep.”
Fek twitched and the book fell to the floor. Minnelil nodded toward the door and stood.
“What?” I asked, pulling the robe tighter around me. It wasn’t cold as I was leaning against the warm wall, but the howling wind made it sound like it should have been.
“Lina, I know you’re excited and that you don’t really have the background knowledge about magic. You missed the early semester and it seems like you’ve never been taught much about magic to begin with.”
“Yeah, nothing. So? What are you saying?”
Minnelil breathed out. “I’ll be blunt. Most people train for months, for years, before learning to channel even as much as you do now. You don’t have to learn everything tonight. You don’t understand how much of an advantage you have, being able to sense magic the way you do.”
For once, she wasn’t smiling. Falar had said my raw talent was insulting. I remembered vividly the way he had said it, like he was the one being insulted. Minnelil’s tone was different.
“Lina,” she said. Her fingers played on the collar of her robe. “It’s inspiring to see, but it’s tough as well. Do you know how long I have been studying magic?”
I shook my head. I didn’t want this. Any of this. The honesty, the praise, having shown off to her.
“Forget it,” she said, scoffing. “I’m being stupid and unkind, and I should be better than that.”
“Minnelil,” I said. “You’re so much better at this than I am. You know it.”
“Hm,” she said, a tiny sound. She craned her neck to look up. There was nothing there, just the black ceiling, but she kept looking for a while. “I meant it when I said it’s inspiring. It’s truly a privilege to work with you.”
I snorted. “Privilege. Not a word I thought someone would use about me.”
“Well, fine, I really like helping you. Elves tend to like interesting people. People with edges.”
“No, that wasn’t…” I didn’t know how to continue. I didn’t know what I had tried to mean, even less what she was talking about now.
She pulled her cowl up, chuckling softly. Her hair hung loose and dark brown in the dim, blue light. Where did the light even come from, in here? “Good night, Lina,” she said.
“Want to hug?” I asked.
She stopped. I heard her swallow. Oh damn, why had I said that? Where had it even come from?
She turned around and wrapped her arms around my neck. She was a bit taller than me, and she leaned her head down, next to my cheek, above my shoulder.
A strand of her hair tickled my nose and I flinched. It made her gasp and her breath made the hairs on my neck stand on end.
“Good night, Min,” I said.
I made a poll on Patreon to figure out which character to feature in the naughty bonus chapters next. Bursar is about to win 😅If you want to go check out the poll, vote, or leave some suggestions, you can do that even without being a Patron.